Title

Monitoring Harassment in Organizations

Author(s)

Laura Boudreau Laura Boudreau (Columbia University)

Sylvain Chassang Sylvain Chassang (Princeton University)

Ada González-Torre Ada González-Torre (Ben Gurion University)

Rachel Heath Rachel Heath (University of Washington)

Abstract

We evaluate secure survey methods designed for the ongoing monitoring of harassment in organizations. We use the resulting data to answer policy relevant questions about the nature of harassment: How prevalent is it? What share of managers is responsible for the misbehavior? How isolated are its victims? To do so, we partner with a large Bangladeshi garment manufacturer to experiment with different designs of phone-based worker surveys. Garbling responses to sensitive questions by automatically recording a random subset as complaints increases reporting of physical harassment by 288%, sexual harassment by 269%, and threatening behavior by 46%. A rapport-building treatment has an insignificant aggregate effect, but may affect men and women differently. Removing team identifiers from survey responses does not significantly increase reporting and prevents the computation of policy-relevant team-level statistics. The resulting data shows that harassment is widespread, that the problem is not restricted to a minority of managers, and that victims are often isolated in teams.

Creation Date

2023-02

Section URL ID

Paper Number

2022-19

URL

https://www.sylvainchassang.org/assets/papers/sensitive_stats.pdf

File Function

Jel

D79, C83

Keyword(s)

Harassment, Garbled Survey Method, Direct Survey Method, Bangladesh

Suppress

false

Series

13